Elena: This part of this article is magnificent! This is exactly what happened and happens.
To clarify, Foucault’s more specific example is that of auto-eroticism and the revolt
against this in eighteenth-century Europe. In this context, masturbation came to be
viewed as a sickness, and a system of monitoring and control was instituted, in
particular over the bodies of children. Foucault writes, ‚But sexuality, through thus
becoming an object of analysis and concern, surveillance and control, engenders as
the same time an intensification of each individual’s desire for, in, an over his
body.‛67 The sexual revolt against such repression can be seen as the counterpoint to
this incursion. The response from power is not to ‚quell the rebellion,‛ but rather to
embrace it through an economic and ideological exploitation of eroticism and sexual
‚liberation,‛ from sun-screen to pornographic films.68 As such, Foucault argues,
‚
control by repression but that of control by stimulation. ‘Get undressed — but be
slim, good-looking, tanned.‛’69
In the case of EI, the ‚repression‛ of the emotional uniform is replaced by the
‚stimulation‛ of emotional mufti. Emotional expression replaces feeling rules and
scripts. But the intelligent management of feeling remains a lifelong project, one
involving the continual and uncertain negotiation of how and when it is right to be
angry, happy, enthusiastic, indifferent, and so forth: one to be undertaken against
65
M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin
Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 56.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid., 57.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
Hughes: Emotional Intelligence
47
the transient, shifting and indefinite standard of what is appropriate in the ebb and
flow of life within and beyond the workplace. In this manner, the emancipation
from the emotional uniform and the resistance of emotional scripts that is offered by
EI is simultaneously a new form of governmentality: resistance becomes discipline,
and equally, as I have argued elsewhere, this self-same discipline offers oppor-
tunities for resistance — perhaps in the very name of emotional honesty and
authenticity that has been solicited.70 The case of EI, then, would appear to exem-
plify Foucault’s arguments that power is exercised as much through what is per-
mitted as what is forbidden, through both collusion and opposition; indeed, it
consists in the generation of such fields of discursive possibility. As Foucault, here
citing Servan, argues: ‚A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains;
but a true politician binds them even more with the chain of their own ideas [which
is] all the stronger if we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our
own work.‛71
No comments:
Post a Comment